Lovely set, Joe. Really nice composition and you've controlled some tricky exposures well. I assume the pictures aren't ooc jpegs - any tips for those who would like to recreate your post-processing?

Thank you JJ. You're right, they're not ooc jpegs. I shot them in RAW and processed them in ACR 7.2. Typically I bracket them -1, 0 and 1 and look for the best starting image. This also gives me the option of processing them as HDR but none of the ones I've posted here are. This image is an HDR, processed with SNS HDR, mainly because I was shooting into the sun.

I start with the exposure slider in ACR, then adjust the shadows and highlights so that they're where I want them. I set the black and white points so that I just barely see the clipping indicators. I then add some Clarity and Vibrance if needed. I adjust the sharpening and turn off noise reduction because I use Imagenomic Noiseware for that in Photoshop. Finally, I check for chromatic aberration and fix that in ACR. Here's a screen shot showing the main ACR window for one of the shots:

As you can see, I had to pull up the Shadows slider to brighten up the rocks and trees. Once I'm done in ACR I open the image in Photoshop CS6, apply noise reduction and use the Nik Color Efex Pro 4 plugin. I like the tonal contrast filter and use it to bump up the midtone contrast a bit more and then add the border using their border filter.

Lastly, for this image, I used a masked curves layer to brighten up the large cloud in the top left since the clarity slider will sometimes make clouds too dark.

I hope that explanation was helpful. I'm sure some would say that the images are over-processed but I like the look and so does my family. That's what's important to me